Monday, October 09, 2006

James Baker: Senior Statesman and One Heck of an Experienced Election Thief.

Has anyone noticed of late, oil man/Republican operative James Baker, most recently seen slithering around the aftermath of the 2000 election (pulling strings for W.), has been making the talk show rounds lately? Must have a book out or something.

I guess the Republican image factory figures the electorate will see Baker lurching around, making pronouncements in his best election season corn-pone drawl, and they will forget to vote because they figure he’ll just help young W. and his gang of hoodlums steal another one?

Stay tuned to find out! And get your ass out and vote, at the very least.

The right likes to trot out old goons like Baker to lend their operation some patina of statesman like experience and probity and all that dark blue suit/red tye aura. But from where I sit, given his stumping for Bush in the aftermath of the 2000 election, James Baker is a fraud.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

NPR: Don't Believe Your Ears

Good old NPR is at it again, fulfilling their function as the soft sell propaganda arm of the Bush junta. Yes folks, there is a reason why the thinking person refers to NPR as National Propaganda Radio.

The formerly creditable network wasn't always a font of disinformation and soft sell propaganda pointed at the mushy center on behalf of right wing idealogues; the slippery slope to propaganda tool for the government started back with Newt Gangreen's "Contract on America" in the '94 mid-term elections. Once the Republicans got control of congress, the message was sent to then-centrist NPR in no uncertain terms: You're too fucking liberal, get with the program or lose your funding!

In the current moment, as we approach the 2006 mid-term election, I hear daily on "Morning Edition" some soft feature that casts some issue or politician in a light favorable to the ruling creep farm. Each morning, I drop my son off at Kindergarten and listen to "Morning Edition" on the way home, and almost daily, I just want to pull over and hurl when I hear the horseshit spewing out of my radio.

Today it was a feature on new treasury secretary Hank Paulson, what a good even keel guy he is, above politics as it were, why he's not even campaigning for Republicans this election! He'd much rather serve the taxpayer than the political arm of the white house! The message? The Bush Administration is changing! We care about you! We're in tune with the American public and your needs! Vote for us!

This was a typical feature, part of a comprehensive effort to spin all aspects of the national debate in favor of Republicans during this election season. A bit less typical, you still get blatant flag waving and right wing pro-war propaganda on occasion.

NPR is not a complete waste of time. There are still great shows like This American Life and Fresh Air, among others. But buyer beware--for quite a while now, the news you hear over NPR is part of a propaganda effort by the scumbag Bushies to convince you that they are OK. We know they are not.

You can't fool all the people all of the time. Not even Karl Rove.